A Fragmented Shoreline

Deborah Carlson is a lawyer with West Coast Environmental Law who explains the complexity of finding solutions to a shoreline that is under various legal jurisdictions.

So I think when you look at the shore it seems obvious to everyone that this is a whole, it’s one system. But when I look at it as a lawyer, through my legal lens, it doesn’t look that way unfortunately. It’s very complicated. The authority is broken up amongst these different bodies and not one single body has authority to manage it as a whole. Unified management is what we need when we’re addressing a challenge like climate change and sea level rise.